Psalm 22:27.---' All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn unto the Lord.'

They shall remember. It is as though something long forgotten had come to mind, had melted their hearts within them.

'Remembering' suggests something old, something past. Are we to say, then, that Divine truth is a mere republication of what the light of nature reveals, a mere echo of what conscience has already spoken? Are we to say that the new life in which God walks with men is merely an old experience recalled and made triumphant? Surely not so. The truth that is according to godliness brings to us thoughts of God which are not our thoughts. And to each man who returns a new life opens---all things become new. And yet all this is so rooted in the old and in the past that it is well said, 'They remember and turn to the Lord.'

It is new; and yet not so new but that it has also been something old in it. A man may be visited by ideas or by convictions that are wholly new, utterly strange to all his previous life. But the case before us is not altogether so. The truth which comes to man by the gospel is new, especially in what it sets forth of the meditation of Christ and the love of God our Savior towards men. And yet men receiving it become aware that just this was at the root of many a hint that touched and troubled the mind's peace during the days of darkness. Just this lay behind many a transient conviction, many a vague and dim impression. The nature of man seemed to hold some threads of this, though too feeble and too dimly to master for themselves the truth. But when all comes out, it seems like a remembering. For you know what it is to be haunted by a dim remembrance that you cannot recall into clear light. It is gone, you say. What was it? What can it have been? Perhaps it is some scene of childhood that just hovers on the mind's horizon. The by some sudden turn, by some accidental suggestion, the right cord is struck, and the whole idea rises vividly and certainly into view.

Something not unlike this is the experience of men when God finds them. It comes to pass in a visitation, a revelation of truth which man had not of his own; a Savior's grace made known, a Savior's message carried home. And yet, under this influence, all real reasons for a man's coming back to God that were present to the mind before, neglected, but real, seem now to have risen from the dead. They assume a new power, they come over the relenting heart with a new persuasiveness. It may be a new view of man and God, of duty and danger and salvation, that has become supreme. But it is a God who has old claims, often felt though not owned; and the wants that now find rest are old wants, the sense of which was often stifled, and the great benefit is something, a vision of which had crossed the mind that knew not what it was. This gospel was soliciting us all along, this Divine presence was waiting to be gracious; this was the claim we resisted, this the authority we despised. Whatever of new has come has put unspeakable meaning into all the old.

But this is so not only with those for whom conversion comes after years of acquaintance with the Christian creed and with the form of godliness. It holds for men as men. True, the incarnation and the redemption of Christ our Lord, and the great salvation built on these, come in as something great and new following on man's woeful fall. Yes; but the God who is revealed in all this, who reaches us through all these, and in Christ becomes ours, is the very God for whom man was made. This is the meaning of man. There is not one whole capacity of affection of the heart but can bear its witness to Him. Every want which redemption supplies refers back to an original relation between God and us, the record of which can never be worn out of God's creature, man. And the blessedness which redemption brings is for the heart of man, as man was planned and made; and the path it opens for us is such a path as human feet were made to walk in. Men find here something that is, in a strange, deep sense, their own. It comes home to them like a remembering.

Returning to God, men come to a land where they had not been, for they were without God and without hope. But they do not come altogether to a strange and foreign shore. Something tells them they were made for this. To be here with God is the proper region; to converse here with God is the fitting exercise of a nature like ours. From this we were exiles by reason of sin. But the country from which we are exiled surely is in some deep sense our own country---our native land. So it comes over us like home---like our Father's house. We remember and turn. Hence, there may be and shall be such a mutual understanding about it---such a consent of a returning world. For when the new life opens its vision to men, it recalls what was common to mankind as man was made---a relation to God, a fellowship with God, for the want of which man is desolate, in the finding of which man is restored. It is the lost past of all of us come back again with something better added---the garden come again and the river that watered the garden, the tree of life and the God that walks in the garden, only all with a wealth of blessing which that first garden never knew.

In Christ, timothy. maranatha